Location-Based Flooding Techniques for Vehicular Emergency Messaging

This paper analyzes the scalability of message flooding protocols in networks with various node densities, which can be expected in vehicular scenarios. Vehicle safety applications require reliable delivery of warning messages to nearby and approaching vehicles. Due to potentially large distances and shadowing, the delivery protocol must forward messages over multiple hops, thereby increasing network congestion and packet collisions. In addition to application-layer backoff delay and duplicate message suppression mechanisms, location-based backoff techniques have been proposed for vehicular networks. We propose a new hybrid method of location-based and counter-based method, and study several variants through simulations. Our preliminary results in the various density scenarios indicate that the proposed hybrid methods outperform conventional backoff delay techniques and adaptively operate in extremely congested network condition